


hope in the most unexpected forms

by Anonymous



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Alternate Universe - Shapeshifters, Eyes, Gen, No Tentacle Sex, Shapeshifting, Telepathy, Tentacle Arda, Tentacles, Wings, background Maedhros/Fingon - Freeform, tentacle hugs
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-10
Updated: 2017-12-10
Packaged: 2019-02-12 23:47:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 5,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12971073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Feanor is a shapeshifter. It's contagious. No one knows why.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [eye(s) of the beholder](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12732555) by [consumptive_sphinx](https://archiveofourown.org/users/consumptive_sphinx/pseuds/consumptive_sphinx). 



> This is never going to be a coherent story that isn't fragmented or disjointed or just weird.

When Maitimo is very young, everything is new and nothing is stranger than anything else. Nothing stands out; nothing is old enough to be background noise. Tirion is warm, elves like to sing, Maitimo and both his parents are shapeshifters, the trees are bright, Alduya follows Ithilya, elves outside their family put on fake smiles but are desperately uncomfortable talking to them. These things are just facts, some of them upsetting, some of them pleasant, and none of them fit together or have any relationship to each other.

There is no particular assumption, in their family, that anyone will have the same shape from day to day. Nerdanel has a favorite form, which she adopts every time she leaves the house, but inside she might be a woman or a man or a cat or a soft huggable blob. Feanaro is the one in the forge holding some half-made thing in both hands, a pair of pliers in another hand, a book in his tentacles behind his back where he can read it with the eyes on his shoulders. Or he’s the tall, thin, tapering thing using the ceiling for extra notetaking space. Or he’s the round blob rolling down the hall or oozing down the stairs. Maitimo knows his parents by their attitudes and habits; it’s strange to be able to cheat with other elves, to be able to tell who they are by their appearance without needing to get to know them. It feels shallow and superficial.

When Makalaure is born, people wonder if he’ll be marred, too. They want to see, and then they talk about how healthy he looks. He has two eyes, two ears, two hands, two feet—but Feanaro did when he was born, too, some people say, and they mean it as a warning. Makalaure might still sprout tentacles, they say; don’t get your hopes up, they mean.

That’s when Maitimo knows he’s supposed to be like them. It’s his own fault they look at him like they do. It’s his all his eyes, all twelve of them, big and curious and always watching. It’s that he opens a mouth when he needs to talk, skin splitting open at some angle somewhere on his body, and also when he needs to eat, and otherwise doesn’t have one.

He goes around as an elven child, two eyes on his forehead, two ears almost even with each other on the sides of his head, one horizontal mouth above his chin. He takes care to bend his arms only where the elbows should go. He has exactly twelve tentacles branching from the ends, and he even puts a fingernail on each one. It doesn’t help.

He stumbles on a winning strategy entirely by accident one day. Grandpa Finwe, in another attempt to get the family to reconcile, invites them over for dinner. Indis isn’t there, but Nolofinwe is, a twentysomething child who watches Feanaro with a sort of pained wariness. Maitimo is stressed and nervous and it makes it hard to hold an elven shape and soon he’s a small furry ball with three big eyes on top and a pair of tiny claws with which he clings to his mother.

Nolofinwe looks away from Feanaro and watches Maitimo instead, hesitantly, as though there’s something he wants to do but isn’t quite brave enough to try. He greets Feanaro and Nerdanel and Maitimo first, and then he asks Nerdanel, “Can I pet him?”

“Only if Maitimo is comfortable with that,” she says.

 _If you want to,_ Maitimo answers telepathically. It’s more convenient to do that than to have a mouth, even if he’ll need one for dinner eventually.

Nolofinwe touches him carefully. “So soft!” he says. Maitimo leans into the touch. Nolofinwe looks like there’s something else he’s not sure if he should ask for.

 _You could show me around the palace,_ Maitimo suggests, letting go of his mother with one claw and reaching for Nolofinwe.

Nolofinwe grins and holds out his arms for Nerdanel to hand Maitimo over to him, and then when she does he grins even harder.

“I’m going to show you everything,” he says. “I am definitely old enough not to drop you.”

 _It’s okay, I can fly,_ says Maitimo.

“Lucky! I wish _my_ dad taught _me_ how to turn into a bird.”

Feanaro and Finwe both watch them, Feanaro intent and puzzled and Finwe pained and uncomfortable.

 _I can try to teach you but I don’t know if other people can do it,_ says Maitimo. Finwe looks deeply alarmed, but, glancing at Feanaro’s hard glare, doesn’t speak up to forbid him from trying.

“I should set you down in case I can do it,” says Nolofinwe. “So I don’t drop you. That wouldn’t be very responsible of me.”

Feanaro blinks and looks back to Nolofinwe and then smiles. “Flight’s less immediately applicable than eyes that face backward or to the sides, which I will try to show you if you want to try to learn.”

“Thank you!” says Nolofinwe. “I’d love to.”


	2. Chapter 2

Maitimo spends a few years as a variety of cute fuzzy creatures and practices his control, until eventually he can flawlessly imitate any and every elf he knows. He doesn’t do that; that would be worse than not looking elven at all. Instead he turns into a tall twelve-year-old elf with red hair and gold eyes. He’s very careful of the details. The ears have to be even, neither one higher or lower than the other. The eyes go right alongside the top of the nose, sunk in recessed sockets below his eyebrows, with about one eye’s width between them. Huge eyes are cute on animals but look unnerving on an otherwise elven face. He’s careful to put the hairline in a plausible place. He’s careful of his legs, of the relative lengths of calf and thigh; he’s careful of his arms, careful of where his fingers reach down to when he stands with them at his sides; he’s careful of his hands, careful that the fingers are a plausible length relative to the palm, careful that each finger has the right number of joints, careful of the creases in his palms. His irises need to be the right size; his eyebrows need to be the right thickness; he has to have a mouth and it has to be the right width and his lips need to be the right thickness and he’s very careful, adjusting it up and down by fractions of an inch, to find exactly the right spot for it.

And then he adds wings. Wings the same muted red as his hair, with the very edges of his feathers gleaming silver—not grey, not white, but silver.

He isn’t trying to hide it. (Only because it wouldn’t work.) He isn’t trying to pretend to be a normal elf, to dishonestly win people over who would rather be suspicious of him.

No, instead, he has nothing to hide. He just happens to have adopted the obviously correct elven form, because he can see that it’s obviously correct, because he is a normal person inside, and it’s perfectly normal to dream of being a little out of the ordinary. (It would not be normal to dream of being a slug. It’s not a coincidence that he doesn’t have his eyes on stalks even though that would be so much better than having them in his face.)

They expect his marring to be obvious and affect his life and relationships, and it does; he chooses a shape that needs slightly unusual clothing, a shape that takes a little extra care to fit through some doorways, a shape that is all of the things they’re expecting and none of the things they’re afraid of.

He is on rare occasions seen transforming his entire body into a bird, with the same red-and-silver feathers as he always has, and other than that presents exactly one face to the world. He’s uncomfortable in his own skin and nervous because he can’t see behind himself and feels trapped and stifled and awkward having to always move rather than grow and being kept out of places he’s too big to fit inside. He feels maimed and crippled by the loss of all but two of his hands, and by the fact that if he trips he absolutely cannot just grow something soft in the direction of the ground to catch himself.

But it works.

-

It does not, Feanaro learns, require marriage or kinship to transmit the so-called marring. His _acquaintance_ Nolofinwe, who is able to see how arbitrary social mores and the preference for a typical elven form are, and who is not actually boring in rare small doses if given years to accumulate material for a moderately interesting five-minute conversation, catches it from him after just shy of two centuries of friendly acquaintance, which conclusively proves that anyone at all can become a shapeshifter.

Nolofinwe only uses it enough to maintain voluntary control and avoid suddenly shifting by accident. He goes flying once a year or so, and moves things around in private, and does nothing else and keeps it secret. This, Feanaro thinks, conclusively proves that the so-called marring doesn’t care if it is used correctly or not.

(Nolo could be more boring if he tried, but not much more and he would have to try very hard.)

Feanaro finds the waste of potential downright painful to contemplate, but if he stops comparing his acquaintance to a hypothetical more interesting Nolo, and instead compares the world where he exists to a world where Indis has only one son, Feanaro has to admit that his existence is a net positive.


	3. Chapter 3

“Are you sure you have the correct number of eyes, Feanaro?”

“Yes.”

“How many eyes do you have right now? Can you count them?”

“Five.”

“And what is the correct number of eyes?”

“Five. Two for normal elven vision, two to extend my range of vision, and one to see radio waves.”

“Feanaro. You know better than that.”

-

“Is that the correct number of eyes, Nelyafinwe?”

“No, Atar. I can’t get it down to two.”

“Try four.”

“Why?”

“Practice controlling the body part you’re having trouble with, but not in exactly the way you’re having trouble with. Sometimes it helps.”

“What do I do now that I have four eyes?”

“Try five.”

“Got it.”

“Four again?”

“That’s easy.”

“Two?”

“Thank you, thank you, thank you!”

“Good work.”

-

“Do you know how many eyes you have?”

“Four. One, two, three, four.”

“And how many eyes do you want to have?”

“Four.”

“Then you did it right. You know, they don’t all have to face forward.”

“I want them to.”

“Then I suppose you have what you want. Good work, Kanafinwe.”

-

“How many eyes do you have, Turkafinwe?”

“No clue. Are we counting spots that just see light?”

“How many of those do you have?”

“A bunch. Check out how many _teeth_ I have.”

-

“Is that the correct number of eyes?”

“It’s a correct number. One or five would be equally good for what I’m trying to do right now.”

“You should always have a correct number of eyes.”

“I do.”

-

“How many eyes do you have?”

“Five. The correct number. Two for normal vision, two to see behind myself and one to see radio.”

“I love you, Curufinwe.”

-

“Which of those eyes belong to which of you?”

“That’s a stupid question.”

-

“How many eyes do you have, Tyelpe?”

“Can’t you count, Atar?”

“Yes. The purpose of the exercise is to be sure you have practice keeping track of your body and shaping it how you like. Eyes are just one organ but the principles translate well to hands, legs, tentacles, teeth, anything you might want.”

-

“You didn’t inherit it from your father?”

“He has it?”

“It’s a secret but I didn’t think it was a secret from you. Yes. Maybe he didn’t have it before you were born and you caught it from him the slow way.”

“Or maybe I caught it the same way your mother did. Look, the point is, what do I do?”

“The, uh… the way I learned to control it was… how many eyes do you have?”

“Seven. The other four are on my spine.”

“And how many eyes do you want to have?”

“I don’t know. Any number, as long as I can control it.”

“Pick a number. Try three. Can you have three?”

“…That’s not the three I wanted. How do I get the ones on my face back? I can’t see anything.”

“Exactly the same way you opened the extras on your back.”

“Maitimo? Do you have to… is it a constant effort for you to look like that? Are you always trying not to sprout tentacles?”

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to do it around me, if you’d be more comfortable not. You don’t have to… to always have the correct number of eyes, or anything.”


	4. Chapter 4

He shouldn’t survive. The pain should tear his soul from his body, should send him fleeing desperately to Mandos. Melkor doesn’t allow that, pins him down in his helpless hurting out-of-control body.

So he doesn’t die but there comes a moment when he should die and instead all his many snapping sharp-toothed mouths close for the last time and his everchanging feathers, down and sleek flight feathers mingled in no particular pattern, disappear. He feels half-numb, as though he’s callused all over, and his changed body slips free of the chains holding him and he curls in on himself in the very brief reprieve while they figure out how to torture him in this new shape.

The form sticks. He can’t open another mouth to bite the orcs, can’t sprout claws to scratch or stab them, can’t open some number of eyes to see what’s happening. He can’t hear them moving, can’t hear if they’re talking about him, can’t hear them planning.

He’s something like a cross between a sea urchin and an octopus and a snake, or maybe a nest of snakes. He counts his tentacles and catches his breath, not that he breathes—he seems to breathe through his skin, maybe—until they grab him by the tentacles, all the tentacles, so many orcs and so many hands everywhere as he writhes and squirms and stretches his tentacles thin enough to slip free only to be caught again and again. He isn’t even sure what they do to him at first, his new senses are too unfamiliar, but he knows it hurts.

Eventually (after how long, he doesn’t know and can’t ask, doesn’t have anyone to help him keep track of the days, months, years, decades, centuries?) he can tell the difference between the pain when they burn him and the pain when they keep him in the dark for (weeks, years?) too long, the pain when they stab him with red-hot iron and the pain when they cut at him with blades, but it doesn’t matter because it all hurts all the time without respite and there is never anything else.

-

The poison smoke burns Findekano’s nose and throat as he breathes but he doesn’t turn back. Visibility’s pretty bad even in broad daylight. He’s not carrying anything irreplaceable, no weapons (he can just have claws if he needs them, claws and fangs), just a harp in case he needs accompaniment while he sings magic. He looks, and he looks and looks and looks, and ducks out of the way of orcs over and over again, and finds his way around Angband, and still he can’t see Maitimo.

He takes a deep breath and suppresses the impulse to cough. Instead he sings and he plays and he listens for any answer.

None comes.

He shouts Maitimo’s name and it echoes back to him from the cliffs but no other elven voice joins his.

He almost doesn’t run. He can’t quite bring himself to admit that Maitimo’s family was right not to try. But now he’s seen Angband from the inside, knows things they can use.

He turns into an eagle and, harp in his talons, flies away.


	5. Chapter 5

Kanafinwe Makalaure makes himself useful, especially when he isn’t doing anything. He’s the crown prince now, with Maitimo gone, and he lets himself be seen while his father the king hides himself in the makeshift workshop on the shore of Lake Mithrim. He takes inventories of supplies, facilitates communication with the cousins who officially (but only officially) follow them, settles disputes (there are too many), walks the tightrope of diplomacy with the locals (they fear him; “he marred our family,” he tells them in their own tongue, neither angry nor proud, “and we would like to see him dead for all his crimes”), and all the while draws from his (captive) (free, for the first time in their lives, truly free) (hopeful, desperate, despairing, purposeful) audience the reactions he most needs.

He can’t say “our losses are finite, our grief is bearable, we will survive and live here and prosper free of jealous gods” any more than he can just say “there’s hope” and have them believe him. He can’t say “your lords are strange and marred but still elves like you” or “we know what we’re doing” or “none of us have died of grief so neither should you” without admitting they need to be said, without admitting they don’t go without saying, without admitting that all these things are in doubt. So he doesn’t.

He stands tall and moves easily and speaks in a regal, ringing voice and he is solemn and sorrowful (sorrowful, not sad, it’s no difference at all and yet it matters) and proud and confident and there for his people (he isn’t any good at this part, not natively, but he can fake it well enough with strangers, he can ask himself what a hero in a tale of battle and daring beside Cuivienen would say to his companions in the wake of their losses, he can ask himself what someone caring and kind and interested in other people would say to someone in pain and mix and match pieces from hundreds of examples until it seems easy, seems like it comes from the heart and not from rote memory) and he never, ever stops acting. He is an elf-lord, pale as marble without the slightest flush of blood in his cheeks, gleaming white, tall as Maitimo used to be. His face is absolutely, perfectly symmetrical, so uncannily flawless he’s more like a statue than a person, all four of his glowing eyes bright and aware and alert (never red from crying; he tells himself they’ll get Maitimo back someday until he believes it enough to go on like everything’s not-fine-but-not-all-utterly-horrible).

The eagle flies in from the north, carrying Findekano’s harp in its talons, losing speed and altitude like it means to land. Makalaure shouts at it to be careful of the harp (because if he can still be counted on to ignore the almost certainly terrible news in favor of worrying about an instrument that isn’t even his, he must be fine, that is what he would do if he were fine, having good priorities would be alarming, would mean the charming and slightly eccentric artist was dead and gone and only the fearsome crown prince remained) and the eagle drops it down to him. He catches it and deliberately wastes time making sure it’s still in good condition before looking at the eagle as it lands by the shore of the lake.

The eagle takes the form of an elf, an extremely forlorn elf with watering, bloodshot eyes, who stays for a while on all fours while he has a coughing fit.

He knows the password and telepathy with him works just fine. He’s Findekano. There’s no actual doubt about where he was, or about what it means that Maitimo’s not with him and Findekano looks that lost.

Findekano looks up at him as though Makalaure is incidental, irrelevant; he is consumed by his failure; he despairs. Makalaure nods and lets out a breath. Findekano, shivering, sits crosslegged on the shore and stares at nothing in particular.

Makalaure walks toward him solemnly, then silently offers him a hand up. Findekano takes it and stands and coughs a bit more, because he is alive and not a frozen tableau of grief—that detail might go in a song that Makalaure will write later, because of course he’ll write a song about this, because if he can make it beautiful enough, distant enough, maybe he can make what happened to the kind and courageous Prince Nelyafinwe a tragedy that belongs in a story.

(His big brother was tortured to death. Mandos will keep Nelyo forever because he’s marred. It was probably a bad death, too. He may have lost control of his bowels before the end. He may have lost control of his shapeshifting. He may have been a filthy bloody mess of feathers and mismatched limbs. In the song there will be a certain poetry to his pain, to his end; there will be a reason, it will all tie into a grand overarching theme that unifies all the tragedies of the war; people will hear the song and like it.)

Findekano catches his breath. “I scouted Angband,” he says. “I should draw a map.”

“I’ll go find some paper,” says Makalaure, more poetic answers coming to mind a moment too late.

“I don’t know if he’s dead,” Findekano says all in a rush. “He might still be alive.”

Makalaure tries to shove that thought in the mental drawer with all the other unpoetic thoughts about their whole situation, but that doesn’t work; he can’t tell himself “he might still be alive” wouldn’t go very well in a song, wouldn’t make it all so much worse—a few words, a single line, a moment of sick horror, but only a moment, it’s only a song, only a suggestion. If all he wants is to make the song perfect, he should include that detail. He should examine the idea from all angles to decide when in the song to introduce it, and how to say it, and whether to repeat it or just mention it once.

“There’s nothing we can do,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

The conversation doesn’t end there. Findekano raises an eyebrow at him but they go and find paper and they talk about Angband and if he includes that at all it’ll be as a single line, maybe two at the most. Details of Angband’s layout aren’t good material for songs. The poison gas, maybe, the poor visibility, maybe he’ll ask about the acoustics later, find out if the place echoes much, if Findekano sang and heard only his own voice in answer. They go on and on, they get the king, the king eventually wanders off to work on the project that will eventually win the war. Later, Makalaure will separate things into discrete sections, cut out the boring parts and the parts that aren’t boring but don’t contribute to the single narrative he wants to craft, and he’ll choose strong endings for each section and for each song. Life will go on past the endings, though, like an orator who belabors a point until it evokes no feeling save boredom. Findekano speaks with his own family privately afterward, and Makalaure spends a while by himself staring at nothing in particular while he tries to excise the most painful parts of Maitimo’s story from the narrative in his head. He can’t quite make it work.

-

What happened was this: Feanaro kindled a fire in all their hearts, awoke in them courage and self-sacrifice and the determination to protect their kindred across the sea. They saw the Ice and would have braved it had they no other choice, but they remembered Alqualonde and turned back. Tyelcormo, always more suited to danger than to peace, and Ambarussa and the maia Huan all four set off to brave the sea and swam to Brithombar where they broke the siege. Thus did they turn Melkor’s marring of their family against him, when they exchanged their elven shapes for those of sea creatures. Not long after, Ambarussa returned together to report on the situation, then swam the sea again to stay with Brithombar and protect them.

In the time that Tyelcormo and Ambarussa and Huan bought him, Maitimo negotiated the loan of the swanships, his first and last and only great triumph before he was lost—if only he hadn’t been cut down, killed in the worst way imaginable.

All of that, at least, is easy and (mostly) painless to put to music, no matter how little poetry there is in their losses in Beleriand.


	6. Chapter 6

Destroying Angband does not constitute permanently defeating Morgoth and eliminating the threat he poses to the people of Beleriand. He and some of his servants can escape and are presumed still alive. That doesn’t mean destroying Angband is worthless, though. They attack the ruins from two sides, one host led by Feanor (as he’s calling himself now), the other by Fingon. Orcs die by the thousands, until the elves stop finding them alive and instead find only crushed and mangled bodies and finally nothing recognizable as having ever been an orc. Some of the bloodstains are suggestive, though.

At least, Fingon thinks, if Maitimo was alive he isn’t anymore.

There’s a light somewhere down in what was the basement. It might be the silmarils. It might be dangerous. It might be the silmarils in Morgoth’s crown, and Morgoth still alive wearing it. Fingon and a handful of his men make the slow climb (there might have been stairs, before), hands too busy for torches, seeing by the light of Fingon’s bioluminescence.

Fingon and Feanor, approaching from opposite sides, reach the bottom of the pit at about the same time. The light is clearly silmaril light, and there are the silmarils, in what looks at first glance like a nest of snakes. After a moment it becomes clear that it’s one creature, something like a cross between a sea urchin and an octopus. It’s pried one of the silmarils free of Morgoth’s crown and is hugging that one separately.

Feanor draws his sword and advances slowly, warily.

“Look at that,” says Fingon. “They don’t burn it.”

“Probably because it’s a plant,” says Feanor.

It’s dark green but it doesn’t resemble any plant Fingon has ever seen.

_Hey,_ he says, _are you someone?_ He uses osanwe since he can’t see any ears or a mouth and since it might not speak either of the languages he speaks.

_Yes, and you’re a trick of the Enemy’s,_ Maitimo answers. _A particularly implausible one._

Fingon goes very still and stares at him. It’s only when Feanor is within his sword’s reach of Maitimo that he speaks up. “That’s not a plant,” he says.

Feanor is quiet for a moment, then crosses the remaining distance, picks Maitimo up with one tentacle, and turns around and heads back to the edge of the pit to climb back up, leaving Fingon and his men to check on all of the non-silmaril things they need to check on.

-

They are still at war; it wouldn’t do to forget that. Makalaure meets with Thindar and answers the questions they have for his father. He meets with their cousins and discusses what they need to do differently now that Angband has been destroyed.

When he’s done with meetings, he pores over maps and considers strategy, holding Maitimo in his lap. He sings lullabies. When Maitimo tells him he can’t hear elven voices anymore, Makalaure sings in dogwhistles; seemingly silent, he sings what comfort he can, and knows it will never be enough.


	7. Chapter 7

The so-called marring passes from Feanor to his children and Fingolfin, and from some combination of them to Fingolfin’s children, and from the lot of them to the elves who follow them—admiration and loyalty and alliance against Morgoth are ties as strong as kinship and there’s enough contact, carrying fallen comrades off the field or putting pressure on nicked arteries, that it sweeps slowly but surely through the ranks. There are even thindar who have it, whose fortunes are forever bound to those of the Noldor, forever barred from the safety of Doriath.

There are those who catch it who hate it, but there are none who catch it—as opposed to being born with it—who seek revenge. There are families who seek revenge for their children’s or parents’ or siblings’ marring. There are people who are horrified to share in their friends’ burden. But always the bonds that let it spread are strong enough to survive.

Physical contact is necessary but not sufficient. There’s an emotional component, too. Admiration will do it, if it’s the right sort of admiration. Love will do it, if it’s the right sort of love. Teachers pass it to students more often than the other way around—but the teachers who expect their students to surpass them, or expect their students to have interesting insights, or who deliberately position themselves as their students’ equals because they believe in that and not as an affectation, catch it from students nearly as often.

Children catch it from parents easily. Parents catch it from children, too, more than half of them before their children are thirty, more than nine tenths of them before their children are a hundred.

“Nolo, are you sure my father couldn’t—?”

“I’m very sure our father couldn’t shapeshift.”

“Have you seen the statistics?”

“No, Naro, I’ve been a little busy fighting a war.”

“Most parents who don’t have it and have children who do have it catch it before their children are grown. It’s—transmission requires a combination of physical contact and affection and… high regard…”

“Oh. Oh, and neither of us, ever… _neither_ of us…”

“I’d’ve thought—if not from me, from you—”

“I’m certain. Never.” He looks sick.

“I have things to do.” Feanor goes and shuts himself away in his workshop for another long while and thinks of useful things that have nothing to do with Finwe.

-

Beleriand floods as the seas rise, and rise and rise. The Noldor flee, accompanied by other refugees, dwarves and humans and moriquendi, all of them alike trudging wearily eastward every day. Makalaure notices two children traveling without their parents, who say their father will be back someday, who say that he is only away. He left, they say, to beg aid from the Valar. Makalaure obligingly spins for them fantasies of Earendil in Valinor, arriving, perhaps, just at the right time for a festival, marching up to the summit of Taniquetil with his head held high, step by step, walking west just as they now walk east. Perhaps instead of the ordinary dust of the road he glitters with the dust of diamonds and rubies. Perhaps diamonds and rubies are frequently ground into powder in the Undying Lands; perhaps things are more frequently destroyed where there is no decay. Perhaps Earendil’s errand bore fruit; perhaps the Valar only came and recaptured Morgoth because he pled so eloquently for aid (and not because the Noldor finally weakened him enough). Perhaps, Makalaure tells them, always perhaps. Perhaps this story has a happy ending. Perhaps Valinor has changed since he lived there. Perhaps luck is with them all.

He tells them—not with certainty; he stops short of that, at least—that it isn’t impossible Earendil looks down on them from a ship in the sky. Look, up there, the dawn star might be him. Perhaps they still have a father watching over them, making sure they’re safe and well.

He tells them this, but he also keeps an eye out for signs they’re hurt or hungry or afraid or losing heart.

(Perhaps they do still have a father watching over them.)

-

The War of Wrath takes an unexpected turn for the worse and call for help; Elrond and Elros decide this means it’s time to run back west, rather than move east faster. Maedhros, who has a Thindarin name now and has grown like a plant to about eight feet in diameter, offers to go with them.

 _Not because anyone but the Valar will matter much in the fighting,_ he says, rather pointedly, because Elrond and Elros haven’t quite realized that yet, _but because if they get anyone out of Angband alive they’ll need advice on what to do with them, and they’ll be more likely to listen to me if they think I was valiant in the war._

 _You’re not just going to keep an eye on us?_ Elros asks. Telepathically, because Maedhros can’t hear elven voices in that shape.

 _You won’t be any safer with me there and you won’t be any less safe going to fight than heading east,_ says Maedhros. _I’d tell you you’re too young to fight if it would make any difference at all._

-

Maedhros holds the twins when they’re afraid or lonely; he carries them part of the way east; he goes to war alongside them, and they alongside him. When they return, victorious, and Elros says his goodbyes to head for the new island in the western sea, there are hugs all around; Maedhros and Maglor and the twins’ adopted uncles and cousins all want to wish him well and celebrate victory and…

(It really _doesn’t_ require sex or kinship.)

…Elros flies west.


	8. Chapter 8

Another tentacled, stuck creature washes up on shore afterward, looking a little shriveled by the saltwater. Whoever it is moves and feels around slowly. Clutched in its tentacles is another, smaller tentacled creature, but the small one turns into an elven child.

_What happened to the forest? Why is the ocean this far east?_ Aredhel asks.

_Happened while the Valar were fighting Morgoth. Where were you?_ says Celegorm.

_Nan Elmoth._

She’s the first besides Maedhros to be stuck; later they get word from Numenor that the same thing happens to Elros when he’s as aged—as wrinkled and grey, as weak, as pained—as most humans are when old age kills them. Such news comes again and again to the elves in the east, of Numenoreans who do not die but cannot shift.

As the marring spreads among mortals, old age ceases to be a concern. Numenor is prosperous and full and beautiful and its people are mostly immortal and content with what they have.


End file.
